Corpora & Bubbles

Corpora & Bubbles A CDA Approach to ELT

Ao. Prof. Mag. Dr. Margit Reitbauer

MMag. Hannes Fromm

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Introduction

• CDA: Critical Discourse Analysis

• „A research enterprise which critically analyses the relation between language and society.“ (Wodak 2013: xxi)

– Identity

– Ideology

– Inequality

How to teach these? How do they relate to language?

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Terminology

• Corpus: „A body of naturally occurring language“ (McEnery et al 2006: 4)

• Bubbles:

– Filter Bubble (Pariser 2011)

–Discourse Bubble (Fromm, forthcoming)

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Part 1 Corpora

• In which educational settings to use them?

– Advanced and digitally literate students of English

– Tertiary education

• Why use them?

– Representativeness (vs. Selection/intuition)

– Authenticity (the case for real language)

• Appropriate learning aims?

Syntax, idiomacy, semantics, lexis, discourse, society

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Corpora for building proficiency

• Exploratory vs. Final Draft learning

• Learning within the language

• Bubble-up vs. Top-down (dictionaries)

– Approach: Build your own dictionary

• Semantic preference: Getting it right

• Semantic prosody: When/where is it used?

• Evaluative polarity: Is it good or bad?

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Bernadini (2004: 25)

Identity and Ideology in Corpora

• Aspects of Identity

– Gender

– Race/ethnicity

– Sexuality

– Religion

• Ideology

– Politics: Trump, Brexit, EU, refugee crisis

– Current issues: Climate change, #blacklivesmatter

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Identity and Ideology in Corpora

• Aspects of identity

– Gender

– Race/ethnicity

– Sexuality

– Religion

• Ideology

– Politics: Trump, Brexit, EU, refugee crisis

– Current issues: Climate change, #blacklivesmatter

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Toolkit for Corpus Analysis in Class

• Open-source Softwares:

– Wordsmith (earlier versions)

– AntConc

• Open-source Corpora:

– British National Corpus (BNC), others: corpus.byu.edu

• Basic categories for analysis

– Keywords

– Collocates (Absolute, relative, R1, L1)

– Concordance lines (natural occurrences)

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Exercises

• Make a word cloud

• Guess top collocates

• Guess adjectives

• Guess the word from collocates

– ETprofessional: Ways to use corpora in teaching

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Top 20 collocates “masculinity” UK corpus Femininity, crisis, modern, toxic, traditional, hyper, notions, violence, power, time, ideas, world, exploration, self, fragile, cooking, assert, symbol, strength, prove

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Part 2

Bubbles

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The Filter Bubble

• Misbalance in a user‘s information diet

• Determined by algorithms (Google, facebook)

• Glass ceiling/ invisible boundaries

• Cognitive bias

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The Filter Bubble

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Screenshot: Pariser (2011: online)

The Discourse Bubble • Isolated, relatively stable communicative sphere

• Mentoring and advice-giving

• Cognitive bias & communal reinforcement (see Phillips, Scott)

• No plurality of opinion

• Extreme ideological standpoints

• Outer fringes of the discursive continuum

• Pedagogy and didactics: Similar to passionate affinity spaces

(Gee & Hayes 2011)

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Passionate Affinity-Based Learning

“[…] occurs when people organize themselves in

the real world and/or via the Internet (or a

virtual world) to learn something connected to a

shared endeavor, interest, or passion.“

(Gee & Hayes 2011: 69)

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Conclusion

• CDA approaches are useful for teaching aspects of identity and ideology in ELT

• Corpora provide an authentic and representative environment for exploratory learning

• Filter bubbles facilitate cognitive bias

• Knowledge of discourse bubbles is fundamental for digital citizenship

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Materials

• References – Bozdag, E. (2013). Bias in algorithmic filtering and personalization. Ethics and Information Technology, vol 15

(3), 209-227. – Gee, J. & Hayes, E. (2011). Language and Learning in the Digital Age. New York: Routledge. – Jäger, S. & Maier, F. (2009). Theoretical and Methodological Aspects of Foucauldian Discourse Analysis and

Dispositive Analysis. In: Wodak, R. & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis [2nd ed.] (pp. 34-61). London: Sage.

– McEnery, T., Xiao, R. & Yukio, T. (2006). Corpus-based Language Studies. London: Routledge. – Pariser, E. (March 2011). Beware online “filter bubbles” [Video file]. TED. Retrieved from

https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles?language=de – Bernadini, S. (2004). Corpora in the Classroom: An Overview and some Reflections on Future Developments.

In J.M. Sinclair, (Ed.), How to Use Corpora in Language Teaching (pp. 15-38). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. – Van Dijk, T. (2009). Critical Discourse Studies: A Sociocognitive Approach. In: Wodak, R. & M. Meyer

(Eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis [2nd ed.] (pp. 62-86). London: Sage. – Wodak, R. (2013). Critical Discourse Analysis – Challenges and Perspectives. In: R. Wodak (Ed.),

Critical Discourse Analysis Vol. I (pp. xxi-xlv). London: Sage.

• Literature tips & useful links – Anderson, W. & Corbett, J. (2009/2017). Exploring English with Online Corpora [2nd edition]. London:

Palgrave. – Aston, G. (2001). Learning with Corpora. Houston: Athelstan. – McCarthy, M. (2004). From Corpus to Classroom. Cambridge: CUP. – Szudarski, P. (2018). Corpus Linguistics for Vocabulary. New York: Routledge. – https://www.etprofessional.com/5-ways-to-use-the-corpora-for-classroom-activities

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